Or, I’ve re-written this article five times now, here goes nothing …
The other night an interesting thing happened and it got me thinking about a number of different topics.
When I first saw the article I thought, hey this is gonna be an article explaining why the keyframe is ironic (witchface) and it’ll be about Samhain, tis the season and there are a few great YouTube videos about witchcraft. I shared it with someone else and their response was immediately sour. When I read it I was initially confused. Then, when I got to the final paragraph I was sad and disgusted. I hadn’t expected such an insensitive take on witchcraft. So, I set about crafting a response that would poke fun at the article and hopefully inspire similar feelings in the author that I had felt.
I began with the keyframe: instead of the tired green Wicked Witch of the West I opted for something I found equally offensive: Norman Bates dressed up like his mother. As I re-read the article and carefully substituted topics, I was repeatedly exposed to the hypocrisy and short-sightedness of the original article. For example, the problems witches (and women) face did not start in 1692. The raised fist logo did not start with The Conversation (2011).
“Go to the river and look at yourself”
- Give up the witch by Venomous Maximus
https://venomousmaximus.bandcamp.com/track/give-up-the-witch-2
Re-writing that final paragraph was painful. I thought, I had watched this person for a long time. She seemed compassionate and thoughtful. She gave the impression she took the high road, weighed consequences of her actions, that she could see the bigger picture and was advocating for inclusive politics and social justice. It seemed out of character.
I shared my parody article with a direct message group on Twitter and didn’t receive any response so I published it the next morning. On Sunday I checked that same DM group and discovered a message from the moderator. It linked my article and asked, “What’s this?” Below that was the statement: You can no longer send Direct Messages to this person. I had been blocked.
It wasn’t a surprise, I’ve been blocked before, I’ve written in detail about it. But I soon learned this wasn’t like that time I got blocked by Transscribe after refusing her request to go away. And for the record, I do regret continuing to pester her after she asked me to stop. Won’t happen again! Check out her Medium: https://medium.com/@katelynburns
I’ve also been blocked by “block bots” that compared the people I was following to a list of “people that trolls follow” and when the bot found a match it blocked me, too.
I checked out the author’s Twitter and discovered she had also blocked me. I wasn’t surprised. But, when I checked my article’s stats it was getting a bunch of hits. A friend of mine told me that I had used a slur in the article, so I removed it. And, if I were given a chance to address it before the block came in I would say the same thing I’m writing now: I apologize for that and I will not be using that word again, and thank you for letting me know. But then I discovered that something else was happening.
The author had posted a link to my article and requested their followers report the article. As I read the comments from her fans I thought, “I am become straw man, destroyer of ideologies.” Then I saw that her followers were including more people, including the guy who had blocked me earlier. Like a faithful retriever he proudly published a screenshot of his block. I also discovered you can block people on Medium. But, since these two are after YouTube views I wasn’t blocked there.
Next, the questions appeared in her thread, “how do I report a Medium article?” and statements, “I just reported them.” “I’ll block his twitter too.” Soon, links I published on Twitter were appearing with a warning, “This Tweet may include sensitive content.” Their behavior reminded me of the YouTube videos I used to see where then-edgelords now crypto-fascists would direct their followers on small content creators in an attempt to mass harass and de-platform people they disagreed with.
The Vampire Castle
“We need to learn, or re-learn, how to build comradeship and solidarity instead of doing capital’s work for it by condemning and abusing each other. This doesn’t mean, of course, that we must always agree — on the contrary, we must create conditions where disagreement can take place without fear of exclusion and excommunication.”
Exiting the Vampire Castle, November 24, 2013
Mark Fisher
Mark Fisher wrote about “the stench of bad conscience and witch-hunting moralism” in a great article called Exiting the Vampire Castle. You should read it, it’s really quite good.
Outside the Castle and off Twitter, a couple of arguments that run through the content I see emerging. One is that “words have meaning.” Which in the context I hear it, “words have meaning and their meaning must be preserved so that they can be weaponized against those that seek to change What Should Be: The Ideal Future.” Another is, “facts don’t care about your feelings.” Which is to say, “I don’t care how anyone else feels.” I think that both arguments express a terrible way to think about the world.
There’s also a line in Adjustment Day by Chuck Palahniuk where one of the characters talks about not wanting to be offended for anyone else anymore. And taking offense can result in missing the point. It reminds me of an article I read in 2016 that started off talking about Rahm Emanuel and Black Lives Matter, and once my anger was peaking the article suddenly shifted to Debbie Wasserman Schultz but only provided a collection of heresay, and truths that applied to the entire Democratic Party at that time; and still do — and all of Washington, for that matter: special interest money, lobbyists, PACs. For a minute I fell for it and got angry at DWS too. Are you angry? Place rage here.
The opposite of these arguments are self-affirming messages and the result is usually “yes men” who kowtow and are uncritical to folks that propagate guilt. This creates a culture where someone does something that upsets another person and their reaction is to use that action to affirm their belief that everyone is out to upset them. They share it with their flock and excommunicate and condemn. The first to spot a mistake are especially thrilled. The more it is shared and the further the fire spreads, the more the people sharing that message are able to enjoy the satisfaction of “being in on it,” welcome to The Vampire’s Castle. Once you’re in you have to hold your breath though, because if you say something that can be used against you, you’ll be the next person expelled. I felt that way in the direct message group I had been expelled from: everyone is afraid to say anything that will offend the other person, triggering their excommunication. If you think you feel bad before you find your Vampire Castle community wait until you see how you feel after a few years in there.
The Vampire Castle serves the opposition because a few things happen: people aren’t given a chance to learn and grow. It feeds the opposing narratives by painting that group as overly-sensitive. It encourages the questions, ‘Is your party or candidate going to expel people, too?’ And, ‘Is this movement really safe for people of my identity?’
Lambasting your nonsense is not calling you out. Criticism is not an act of casting you out. It may hurt your feelings but it is not an attempt to remove your platform or silence you. You are responsible for your own actions. Screaming, “unacceptable” and creating an avalanche on your platform, directing it at the offending party in an effort to de-platform and silence them is wrong. It’s also disgusting to see a group of people pouring over the excommunicated, invoking their possible identities in an attempt at some kind of self-affirmation. ‘Good. We kicked out an old white male fake woke bigot puerto rican anarchist neoliberal weirdo hypocrite that retweets trans-positive posts. Pat yourselves on the backs my flock. The Vampire Sermon continues.’
The right might silence people through humiliation and shame but I don’t see a lot of calling out and casting out going on. For example, Sargon of Akkad wanting to be relevant again, his crypto-fascist power level having waned. Sargon goes on a livestream with the new fascists whose power levels exceed him and his ideas are laughed at. They ask him, are you kidding? And it’s like the kid in the Emperor’s New Clothes, “but he doesn’t have anything on!” They didn’t make him leave, attempt to de-platform him and report his posts; they also didn’t block him. They just laughed at him and told him he’s irrelevant. Perhaps that’s why a common narrative is, “I tried to engage the left and got cast out so then I went to the right and was welcomed in. We have different ideologies (for now) but they tolerate me because they need exposure, traction, and conversation. And that’s how I became a [insert crypto-fascist identity nonsense here].”
